Inpatient Therapy Fellowship Outreach

 

Occasionally Bridges and Balm receives a request where the survivor was so severely impacted that the care needed to build a foundation for the healing process is extensive. This typically means the survivor is in need of expensive intensive inpatient therapy.  We recently received one of these requests. 

 

In this case, inpatient therapy has been advised by the survivor’s therapist. The sexual abuse, which occurred nearly two decades ago, remains unresolved in terms of institutional accountability and financial support for treatment. While all parties acknowledge that a senior brother worker sexually abused a sister worker, concrete steps to support the survivor have been elusive. In the meantime, the trauma that the survivor suffered resurfaces often and continually disrupts her well-being and her family life.

 

The survivor has been professionally advised to undergo an intensive 4 to 6 weeks of inpatient therapy, which is expected to cost $35,000-50,000. She has reached out for assistance in funding this therapy. Bridges & Balm has agreed to help secure the funding. 

 

To minimize the impact on those who support survivors and to ask those with most responsibility first, we have requested funding assistance from the following sources in the order of priority listed below.

 

• Insurance - The survivor has submitted a preliminary request to insurance, which has been declined thus far. It appears unlikely that insurance will cover any of the expense at this point, but we will continue to pursue insurance options with the survivor.

• Regional Overseers - Bridges & Balm has contacted past and present overseers in the region where the abuse occurred, but there has been either no response or no help has been forthcoming for a wide variety of reasons. We have also contacted overseers in adjacent regions, and they have also declined providing ministry funds from their region. Based on these attempts, we anticipate no funding will be available from overseer-controlled trust funds.

 

While we haven’t given up in pursuing funding from the sources above, it's clear that we need to move forward with other sources. While Bridges & Balm is able to provide a portion of the funds, we aren’t able to cover the whole amount and still keep our commitments to our existing recipients and the broader inactive and transitioning worker/survivor community we seek to serve. 

 

Therefore, we are now reaching out to the other potential sources to complete the funding.

• Collaboration with other charities: We have reached out to other fellowship-focused survivor charities and received a positive response. We can foresee getting 20-25% of the funding from these sources.

• Direct Outreach to the Fellowship: That is the purpose of this campaign. We realize that the broader fellowship community is being asked to provide funds for therapy when money given to the ministry may have been expected to be used for survivor therapy. While this is indeed happening in some states, we are finding that it is not in many others.

 

How You Can Help

Bridges & Balm is expecting to be able to cover 40-50% of the Survivor’s inpatient therapy costs, and with collaborating charities providing 20%, we are hoping to raise 20-30% ($8,000-$11,000) from the fellowship outreach campaign. The sheer magnitude of the inpatient therapy cost has caused this request to languish for many months, but when we divide the cost between the larger funding community, it is much more manageable. Note that if additional funding does become available from insurance or ministry funds we will reduce the fellowship outreach amount appropriately.

 

We are better together! Please consider the donation options below to help those who have experienced the deepest wounds. 

• Donate to Bridges & Balm specifically for this survivor. On the Bridges & Balm donate page please select the CSA/SA fund, specify survivor code S0995 and we will use it specifically for this survivor. Your year-end donations can make a huge difference while potentially qualifying for tax benefits. 

• Donate to the survivor fund directly. This will not be tax-deductible, but may be preferable to some. Please contact us and we can give you the information so you can donate directly to the fund.

 

Thank you for reading this and supporting survivors and transitioning workers through Bridges & Balm! We will keep you updated monthly on our progress. Even if donating is not in your budget right now, you can make a meaningful impact by spreading awareness of our mission within your meetings, among friends and family, and throughout the fellowship community. We thank you for your love and care for the most vulnerable amongst us. We are grateful for you and to be a part of Bridges & Balm, and glad you're with us on this journey.

 

For more information, please visit the Bridges & Balm Website.